Friday, October 12, 2007

Why aren't more people yelling at Ann Coulter?

Ann Coulter pulled a Don Imus Monday on a national talk show, but nobody in the general community seems to care.

Coulter said Jews should improve themselves by becoming Christians. In other words, Judaism as a religion needs to be "perfected". There is something wrong with the people who practice this faith and, by extension, with the religion itself. It's OK, but you can do better by becoming a Christian, according to the right-wing yakker.

It's not a new idea -- in fact it's thousands of years old and called replacement theology. The idea: God chose the Jews to be His people, but they blew it by not believing the Jesus was the messiah, so now God threw them over, changed His mind as it were, and chose Christians.

I wonder how it would play if she called African-Americans inferior to whites, or Hispanics inferior to African-Americans, or Greek Orthodoxy inferior to Roman Catholicism. You can't get away with that. The Rev. Al Sharpton would scream, as he should do. Sharpton screamed at Don Imus for referring to some African-American young women basketball players in racist and sexist terms.

It's Friday. I just went through more than 70 news sites, from CBS to the Huffington Post, I didn't see one Christian news site or one minority news site condemning this travesty. There were those who said people give Coulter too much ink and air time, those who say people should be able to say whatever they want and those who yawn.

Don Imus lost his job in April and has not yet gone back on the air, although he may be close. Ann Coulter continues to be paid for her idiocy and people continue to tune in to see what she has to say, buy her books and make her a wealthy woman.

I guess it's OK to denigrate certain groups. Blacks say they are respectful, even jealous, of the way Jews helped each other out of the ghettos such as the Lower East Side and East New York and Brownsville.

I think Jews should be respectful, even jealous, of the way people like The Reverend Al and Jesse Jackson are quick to get into the face of people who denegrate their people. They march, demand, get themselves on television and get people fired.

Imus apologized and so what? Ann Coulter told CNBC host Donny Deutsch she was sorry for her remarks and that they were misconstrued. The National Jewish Democratic Committee has called for her to be banned and more than 500 posts have been made in the blogosphere commenting on Coulter. The ADL has condemned. The Jewish groups have condemned.

But I didn't find one from the black civil rights groups and I should have.

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I guess I should cluck about the chicken controversy.

The way I see It: On one side, chickens are said to make good pets. The hen-vocates say they are smarter than dogs and more loyal than cats. On the othe side, they don't wear diapers. But then again, neither do dogs.

I had a pet chicken once, for a few days. My father worked in a factory and was forever bringing home something. One time it was a dog and a few years later, a cat. So when I was about 10 years old, he brought home a chicken. He put some twine around the chicken's neck and tied it to a stake he drove into the ground near our home.

I thought this was going to be a pet for me. I fed the chicken and played with it, leading it around by the twine leash.

Then, the foul day came when my father told me to bring the chicken and get into the car. I had no idea we were going to see Max Prager, the ritual slaughterer. I guess my father didn't know how attached I had become to the chicken and I was in the room when the hen was slaughtered. It was to be our dinner.

When I got out on my own, I refused to each chicken for years, until I was married.

Anyway, I can't see the harm in allowing some people the freedom to have a few hens around. No roosters, though...they make too much noise much too early.

If people can have dogs, especially the little yappy ones that never shut up, why not chickens?

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Who says life doesn't imitate art?

Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday (Oct. 11, 2007), along with some United Nations agency.

Congrats to Gore, who has been in the forefront of the fight against the global warming that Bush and his cronies say isn't happening.

There was a full-page ad in the New York Times this week asking for Al Gore to allow himself to be drafted into a presidential run. I wonder if this wonderful award will spark some interest in the mind of Gore and his family.

Or, maybe, it will be deja vu all over again. A Clinton-Gore ticket in 2008.

It looks as if anyone can beat the Republicans because of a previous bad presidency. The last time we had that situation, in 1976 because of President Ford's pardon of Richard NIxon, we ended up with Jimmy Carter. Let's not do that again, shall we? Carter, arguably the worst ex-president in history, will give up that title when Bush is retired in 2009, so let's make sure whomever we run in 2008 isn't another Carter, a weak, naive, religious hypocrite who hates Jews.

But let's say Gore gets drafted and, with Hillary Rodham Clinton by his side (deja vu with a twist), he wins. So we have a somewhat liberal Democrat with a Nobel prize in the White House.

Remind you of anything? Right -- The West Wing with Nobel-laureate Josiah Bartlet (economics) as a president who had to be drafted and who served two terms. By the way, there was a real Josiah Bartlett, from New Hampshire, who was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. See, you learned something.

If I were a betting man, I'd bet Gore will not run. But I wouldn't bet a lot.

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Have a great weekend and for those in the tribe, even though we may need perfecting, have a good Shabbos.

Until next time...

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